This past weekend was the first episode of the new series (or season, in the American vernacular) of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is a series that has reinvented itself numerous times, usually when the Doctor regenerates but sometimes even without a change in the lead actor, the series has tried to move in a different direction.
Similarly, I recently read an article on Heroes that got me thinking about my own RPG campaigns. I’ve had a lot of campaigns over the years that, for whatever reason, either didn’t go as planned or deteriorated as time went on, which was a shame if I and the players really loved the original premise. Also, due to the nature of collaborative play (and all roleplaying is, in some sense, “collaborative”), there were many times where I felt that the campaign was going wrong but the players still enjoyed playing their characters.
In such cases I found it preferable to “regenerate” the campaign, taking the elements that worked and incorporating them into a new paradigm that freshens up the campaign and makes it interesting again for those who’ve lost it. Here are a few ways that I’ve used over the years to regenerate a campaign.
Embrace the Change. The TV series Arrow was a very different beast in the beginning than it is now; it was grounded in a more realistic “Nolanverse” with no characters having true superpowers and costumes being downplayed. As time went on, the creators opted for the more popular move of making the series more overtly superheroic, with superpowers and more colorful heroes and villains. This hasn’t really hurt the ratings at all.
Similarly, in my most recent Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign I opted to create a low-magic world, but in allowing the players to have standard characters and the need to challenge them I’ve been slowly increasing the magical level of the world to match. While some of the players have noticed this, they all are enjoying the campaign as much now as when we started.
Take a Different Direction. Doctor Who was always about traveling through time and space, but in the classic series a bold move was made to exile the Doctor on Earth for a while. While he was still the Doctor, he now worked with a (somewhat) secret military task force to stop alien threats in near-future Earth. Prior to this, “contemporary” adventures were rare. Still, this reinvigorated the show and made it feel fresh in spite of keeping a lot of the same elements.
In my first WitchCraft campaign I was running out of ideas and my players had faced most of the rogues gallery, many of them more than once. One area that I hadn’t played with were the chaos-based adversaries and I focused on one Great Old One (for lack of a better word) that had a plan that required the PC’s old adversaries to work with them against the new threat. Suddenly a largely black and white campaign turned into a grey one that involved an overarching Cthulhu-esque conspiracy.
Recommit to the Original Premise. (Star Trek) Enterprise came out of the gate as a prequel series for the Star Trek franchise but, IMHO, lost that focus almost out of the gate. The Temporal Cold War arc was confusing and arbitrary and the Xindi War just took things into a different direction that also ended up involving time travel. Season Four addressed those issues, tying up the loose ends of previous seasons and moving forward with more of a “this is how the universe you saw in the other series came to be” vibe.
When I was running a 7th Sea campaign, I began with the premise that the players were essentially “Zorro,” being members of a hacienda that was under foreign rule and secretly fighting against them. As I bought more source books I became enamored of the more Cthulhu-esque metaplot and began adding more of those elements to the point where the players started feeling less like swashbuckling heroes and more Call of Cthulhu (or, perhaps more aptly, Delta Green) investigators. When I got feedback that the players weren’t really enjoying the new direction, I dissolved it and let the players get back to playing the original premise, reinforcing the brutality and oppressiveness of the foreign conquerors.
Those are some of the ways that I’ve “regenerated” a campaign without changing characters or ending it. How about you? How have you tried to regenerate a campaign? How well did it work? Is there anything that you wouldn’t do again or is there something that worked exceptionally well? Have you ever lamented ending a campaign because a regeneration might have worked?
nice article, really enjoyed it, thanks 🙂
Nicely written! I too have regenerated games. Usually it ends up involving a player having a new character – the introduction of a new face and the various effects of losing a trusted member of the group reshapes the narrative completely.
Too, when the players have defeated the “big evil guy,” it sometimes feels like there should be credits rolling – which is awesome, my players adore that feeling of standing there in a heroic pose, soaking in the praise of the masses.
But then there’s always the “now what” phase, you know what I mean? If the players aren’t ready to set those heroes aside and make brand new ones, that’s when it’s time to do a little footwork.
We actually just did something like this, and this time around the regeneration was a much more drawn out and actually kind of painful process. Painful for the PCs definitely but not easy on the players either.
The heroes had saved the world (literally the whole planet was going to get magically drained and then physically devoured); they were standing among the gods at the “roll credits” moment. Where do you *go* from there, right? Well – down to earth. Rather literally. They returned to a world that was deeply and fundamentally changed – the very fabric of magic had been broken and reshaped; across the world horrible events had happened and entire kingdoms had collapsed, while others had survived. While the damage was much less than it could have been, there was still a lot of suffering.
At first I toyed with the idea that the heroes would be blamed for the calamities, but the players themselves moved into a completely different direction – with one of them meddling in powerful magic despite knowing that such meddling was likely to go very, very wrong. And go wrong it did – she vanished and her friends and partners were left wondering if she were even alive. For five years (in the game world), the entire group shattered apart, each searching, and grieving, in their own way. None of them worked together (a decision actually made mutually by my players while I looked on in bemusement)! As for the missing PC, she spent her five years trying to get home from the faraway land she found herself transported; and becoming a pirate queen in the process.
Now – the players mostly loved this “five years” process. Due to some health problems we ended up not having formal sessions of any sort for more than a year! We communicated through emails and pretty much did everything in the “five years” as straight RP with little combat.
And now finally FINALLY we’re all back together – and the campaign is taking off again – but it’s a whole new set of people, without actually changing characters.
I’ve tossed the towel in on campaigns that I retrospectively wished that I’d tried to save or regenerate. Often they’d die because papered over player conflicts just couldn’t be kept under wraps–and that’s hard to fix at the game level. It takes courage to cut people out of your play group to improve the experience for everyone else, but I wish I’d done it.
I had a Mage campaign totally derail when the PCs decided that the technocracy was much more competent than they were. They wound up burning down their house and driving the group states away, hiding on a reservation with relatives. That was a short, sharp turn; after a several session interlude, they resolved the reservation plot and went on the offensive.
Thanks for this thoughtful article Walt, I really appreciated how you compared television shows to the goings on in your own games. It served as a good illustration.
I would like to invite you to consider the word “Evolution” instead of “Regeneration”. This is why: to regenerate implies recuperation after some sort of injury or mishap – to regain what was lost, as it were. However evolution implies a natural adaptation to an environment that allows something to thrive.
If a television show has to do this in order to adapt to nuances in the plot and audience, how much more so is it applicable to an RPG that relies so heavily on improvisation? Every description you gave of your own gaming efforts depicts a sensitivity to when the change is needed, and a competent implementation of some corrective action.
Based on my experience, this sort of adaptation enhances campaign longevity.
Had this sort of problem in college, the next year’s crew were rotating in/out, She wanted to rebuild her character, he was tied of his, another wanted to play a just published X… My ‘final’ solution was a brain blitz of what everyone wanted to see and go that way. At the time, I was very much a track layer and it took a long time to move to just the engineer. Now I prefer conductor or even hobo, passing the gritty work off as fast as I can.
I suggest a hiatus every so often, letting the GM rest and the players regroup. As in real life, character lives change and things happen. Our long time Fighter took a job in the Royal Guard, the player swapping roles with our Sorcerer who switched to a Dwarf Armored Hulk. The Cleric swapped in for a Draconic Oracle. The GM let me ‘discover my true calling as a Paladin and convert 6 levels of Fighter into Clark Kent with a sword. Yes friends, MR KILL’EM ALL is now a goody two shoes. Both the Rogue and Arcanist stayed much the same and the Wizard hasn’t changed a bit. This winter should be interesting.